Foreign travellers in Milan and their interests: From the landmarks on the Grand Tour to the art and antiquities market

Abstract

This article reviews the presence and movements of foreign travellers in Milan in the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on the cultural context of art collecting. Perceptions of the Milan region abroad are examined through a number of guides and illustrated digests aimed at foreign visitors and produced by local publishers such as Giovanni Pietro Giegler, Ferdinando Artaria, Bettalli and Vallardi. Along with the main landmarks, the importance of private palaces and their art galleries has also been researched. Among them are locations associated with some established names (the Archinto, Litta, Borromeo and Trivulzio families), as well as new entries such as the Poldi Pezzoli family. The sections of guidebooks devoted to the city’s antiquarian market were particularly significant within these publications, a study of which helps us to understand the unexpected dynamics of some emerging antique dealers’ careers. Emphasis is placed on case-studies, notably the important and remarkable example of Alfonso Reichmann, whose family owned a famous hotel at Porta Romana. Reichmann successfully engaged in the domestic and international art trade, dealing with foreign museums as well as with Italian institutions and collectors, including Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli.

A fairly extensive literature has been dedicated to the Grand Tour and to well-heeled travellers in Italy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet Milan has been largely overlooked; as the city was a decidedly less popular destination than the main sights at the time, this is not surprising, but its neglect may partly be due to the lack of material sources related to Milan. To redress this imbalance would be an ambitious goal given the limits of this article, but a few exemplary cases may usefully be highlighted.¹ Our focus is on the period between the fourth and the eighth decades of the nineteenth century, during which Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli set up his collection, putting himself forward as an eager, modern collector ready to open the door to Europe. The image of Milan as a changing city emerges from travellers’ journals, as does the growing relevance of its art collections, both public and private. The latter, veritable treasure troves hitherto hidden from the so-called forestieri (outsiders), lay at the heart of refined Milanese society and were celebrated by the city guides as an integral feature of Milan’s heritage. Poldi Pezzoli’s dedication to his own mansion reveals his appreciation for the great Milanese furnishing tradition and the great care taken of their personal collections by private collectors; but it also indicates his desire for further distinction, which originated from being himself an open and curious traveller.

The shortcomings of Lombard–Milanese historiography in terms of awareness of the artistic and cultural resources of the region, and its inability over time to define and convey adequately the marks of its artistic identity have been emphasized elsewhere. This lack of an established identity at the time meant that foreign travellers were mostly unable to distinguish the specificity of Milan and its attractions.² The evolving perceptions formed by foreigners of the monuments of Milan and its surroundings are therefore of relevance in the broader study of nineteenth-century foreign travels within the peninsula. Unfortunately, travellers’ judgements are not always easy to decipher, being subjective, discontinuous and unsystematic in form. Opinions are expressed in disparate sources, such as on-the-spot reports, personal correspondence, notes and diaries, but they are nonetheless capable of providing the historian with valuable information.³ Among the most extraordinary sources available in connection with Milan are the study notes of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, then director of the National Gallery in London. Owing to his repeated visits to Italy in the mid-nineteenth century and his diligently annotated diaries (now edited by Susanna Avery), his evidence offers an outstanding source of information on a number of works of art, for which he also provided important data on their estimation in the international antiques market. Before the arrival of foreign connoisseurs around the middle of the century, many of these works remained confined to the inner circle of Milanese scholars and litterati.⁴ The differing views of ‘local experts and foreign connoisseurs’, brilliantly compared by Alessandro Morandotti, provide an effective key to understanding what could be seen as an early example of culture clash.⁵

As for local guidebooks, even though they did not go so far as to debate scientific or historiographical topics, they were usually not entirely devoid of correct – albeit basic – information. Within a short time these publications came to be highly appreciated by travellers, thanks also to their engaging and popular tone. The handy guidebooks produced by the city’s historians and antiquaries, many of them illustrated and often translated into several languages,⁶ were designed as mementos and souvenirs to carry home.⁷ Booklets and almanacs were released by the powerful Milanese publishing industry, and a rather colourful team of professionals – including scholars, artists, booksellers and printers – formed ad hoc associations whose purpose was both informative and promotional, when not overtly commercial. Among the main players, the activity of the Vallardi brothers, whose expertise and commercial activity already transcended the national borders, appears to have been decisive.⁸

Several visitors’ diaries mention the welcome they received from the Milanese aristocracy, and later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the rich merchant class which eventually inherited the city’s highly profitable practice of offering hospitality, with all its associated customs and obligations. Traces of this hospitality can be found in the archives of a few great families, which reveal the resources needed to make collections more ‘accessible’, from an expert staff to caretakers, gardeners and even the very owners of the collections, who had to be at hand to assist during the visits and answer travellers’ queries. A truly remarkable case emerges from the documentation in the Borromeo archive on the Isola Bella, which was one of the tour’s favourite destinations owing to Lake Maggiore’s strategic position at the exit from the Swiss passes (Fig. 1).⁹ The ‘Visits’ section of the archive holds the correspondence between Count Borromeo and the assistants at his idyllic residence. The many tasks entailed by the public opening of the palazzo ranged from verifying visitors’ credentials to acquiring their visiting cards, and conducting the actual visit to the art collection, which provided around 5 per cent of the total income of the island.¹⁰ Starting from 1804, thousands of signatures, together with the country of origin of each signatory, were recorded in the palazzo’s voluminous visitors’ books (libri de’ forestieri). It is no mystery that the Borromeo family was eager to offer foreigners a grand image of their role and lineage, which explains their painstaking restoration of the works of art and the constant rearrangement and repositioning of the collections within the various wings of the palace. The amenities of the place never disappointed, leaving visitors enthused by its scenery and the sumptuous gardens set spectacularly within the naturalistic frame of the lake. On the other hand, opinions of the collection’s presentation as conceived by the Borromeo family were less positive – at times scathing – as the presence of excessive numbers of copies was looked down on, even by less knowledgeable guests.¹¹

In other cases, however, the enthusiasm for the welcome received was truly without reserve. In the correspondence following her stay in Milan in 1819, Sydney, Lady Morgan (1776–1859) never ceased to thank Federico, Count Confalonieri (1785–1846), and his wife, Teresa Casati (1787–1830), whose mediation had opened many doors for Lady Morgan and her husband within the city’s most liberal milieu: the exclusive Casino dei Nobili, the private residence of Count Luigi Porro Lambertenghi (1780–1860) with its famous collection of Etruscan vases, and the Palazzo Trivulzio in Piazza San Alessandro.¹² The popular Irish novelist was also pleased to discover that her name was actually well known in Milan: ‘Madame Confalonieri began by taking us to the Corso . . . and introducing us at the Casino, where the nobility are exclusive and where even professional men are not admitted. Thus presented, our success was undoubted; but we found it was already prepared for us by the eternal France, and by Morgan’s work in France sent here from Geneva.’ Lady Morgan was clearly impressed by her broad-minded hosts: ‘Not only the liberal party have visited and invited us, but the Austrian Commander-in-Chief and his wife have been to see us.’¹³ Happily immersed in the Milanese lifestyle, the Morgans were also invited to spend time on Lake Como, as guests of the Sommariva and the Tempi families. The enchanted landscape of the lake, which would captivate many other writers from Ruskin to Stendhal, deeply fascinated Lady Morgan, who evoked it in her travelogue as nothing short of a botanical paradise.¹⁴

The lake itineraries, in particular Como, Varese and Lugano, were the most popular among foreign visitors. The guidebooks produced by the small Milanese publishing trade reflected this trend and catered for their audiences’ expectations. Great attention was paid to natural landscapes and gardening, in a bid to adapt to British taste and education, while the more dramatic Romantic locations, such as the gorges of Bellano and Nesso, greatly appealed to the German visitors. The Manuel pittoresque des étrangers published by the Casa Artaria in 1832 in the form of a souvenir publication was lavishly printed on quality paper and handsomely bound. This guidebook was illustrated with views of the lakes and historic villas by well-known artists. Among the featured villas were the Tremezzina in Sommariva and the Como summer residence of the great bel canto singer Giuditta Pasta (Fig. 2), who was then regularly enchanting audiences at La Scala.

The image of the city

Studies of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour show that Milan did indeed form part of the traditional route but was not a mandatory stop; rather it was a stopover – or a detour – on the route towards the more popular destinations promoted by the antiquarian culture of the time, such as Rome or Naples, followed by Florence and Venice. Although visiting Milan was not considered a must, owing to the scarcity of ancient remains, it was popular among the many travellers of the Ancien Régime, from Gibbon to Goethe and Lalande, to mention but the most famous. By the eighteenth century, the city’s tourist itineraries were already well defined: the Duomo of course, but also the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the Cenacolo vinciano and the Settala Museum. In addition, many private houses were able to satisfy the encyclopedic curiosity of the ‘République des Savants’, thanks to their libraries and collections.¹⁵

Milan’s ‘inferiority complex’ in relation to the Eternal City and its unparalleled heritage, along with its distinct pride and desire to establish itself, would continue to mark the image of the city until the 1840s and perhaps even later. The reshaping of Milan’s image gave rise to the production of a whole new range of local views, which openly echoed the typical ‘Roman style’ vedute. This is the case with the series of ‘views of bucolic Brianza’, an area north of the city, produced by the prolific engraver Giuseppe Bisi (Fig. 3), which undoubtedly proved evocative for northern European visitors.¹⁶ The Veduta immaginaria con monumenti di Milano, in the style of the eclectic compositions by the painter and architect Gian Paolo Pannini (1691–1765), is datable to the end of the 1840s and spearheaded a brand new style labelled ‘Mirabilia Urbis Mediolani’, by merging ancient and modern to create one of the icons of a dynamic leading city (Fig. 4).

The building fervour of the Napoleonic years had, in fact, compensated for the city’s lack of ancient edifices with a series of highly visible monumental buildings, such as the Arc de Triomphe (the city gate of Porta Sempione) and the arena, which were built in neoclassical style within a new perspective of modernity and functionality. The renewed look was widely celebrated in the Veduta generale della città di Milano, based on a drawing by Filippo Naymiller and engraved by Filippo Campi around the third decade of the nineteenth century (Fig. 5). Among the accompanying vignettes illustrating the individual monuments, captioned in both Italian and French, are the historic buildings of sacred Milan, including San Paolo delle Monache, Santa Eufemia, the church of San Marco and the Tempio Civico of San Sebastiano, along with the newly built neoclassical landmarks Porta Comasina (now Porta Garibaldi), the San Francesco barracks (now Caserma Garibaldi), the church of San Tomaso, the Royal Mint and the Teatro dei Filodrammatici.

This new image of the city was given great emphasis by Mariana Starke (1762–1838) in her travel guide, one of the most popular of the time, especially among English travellers. Her Letters from Italy, almost a chronicle from the Napoleonic battlefields, was first published in 1800. In 1820 an updated version was released by her publisher, John Murray, with the new title Travels on the Continent.¹⁷ Starting her itinerary from the Porta Sempione, Starke hailed the Arc de Triomphe as ‘the greatest ornament to be seen when entering Milan’, in fact praising the monument as a still ‘unfinished’ but ‘magnificent work’. Starke then stopped at the church of San Lorenzo, embellished ‘by handsome columns . . . the only specimen of ancient Roman architecture still standing in Milan’, and updated her readers on the state of Leonardo’s famous Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, adding that a fine copy of it had been made in 1810 for the last viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, by Giuseppe Bossi (1777–1815). The English writer then spoke highly of the Porta verso Marengo (now Porta Ticinese), considering it ‘a simple and elegant example of Ionic architecture’, as well as of the amphitheatre near the Forum, ‘a magnificent building erected after a project by Luigi Canonica’. The Teatro alla Scala by Giuseppe Piermarini was similarly praised as ‘the most beautiful opera house in Europe’.¹⁸ Predictably, an exhaustive account was reserved for the ‘Brera College of Sciences and Arts’, ‘now the Gymnasium’, undoubtedly perceived as the modern epicentre of the Milanese artistic scene, endowed as it was with a ‘fine collection of pictures’. Exclamation marks were intended to alert tourists to museum highlights and were generously bestowed on the great Bolognese classicists – those in the Sampieri collection: ‘Guido (!), San Peter and San Paul’, ‘Albani(!!), A Dance of winged Loves’, ‘Guercino (!!!) Abraham dismissing Hagar’. Other masterpieces from different schools were also enthusiastically highlighted: ‘Our Saviour dead by Benvenuto Garofalo (!)’,¹⁹ ‘Souls delivered from Purgatory by Salvator Rosa (!)’, ‘The head of monks by Velasquez (!!)’.²⁰ Finally, the writer pointed out that ‘the gymnasium contains casts of all the finest Statues’, referring to the casts recovered by Giuseppe Bossi when he served as secretary of the Braidense institution, and placed at the disposal of the Brera Academy’s drawing school.

Together with the main public destinations, the city’s strong point was certainly the private palaces of the local aristocracy. As we have already seen, access to these mansions was granted according to specific and elitist rules: the so-called ‘entratura’, a practice introduced in the eighteenth century, was described in detail by Serviliano Lattuada (1737) and later by Carlo Bianconi (1787). The Cusani, Litta, Clerici, Belgioioso, Trivulzio, Simonetta and Settala family residences were celebrated for their imposing yet refined architecture, and also for the importance of their collections. Travellers, however, were not only drawn to this splendour by its educational aspect, but also by the opportunity to experience the coveted lifestyle of these ancient families: their luxurious furnishings, the lavish banquets, the carriages and the soirées at the theatre – a way of life that also provided a perfect showcase for local artistry and craftsmanship.²¹ Following the Napoleonic era, a steady flow of travellers (mainly British) into Milan resumed, and it is no coincidence that in 1819 two important guidebooks in French were published: the Nouvelle description de la ville de Milan, compiled by the Modenese Giovanni Battista Carta (1783–1871) with the support of a number of prolific publishers, such as Giovanni Pietro Giegler, Ferdinando Artaria and the Bettalli brothers, and the Guide des étrangers à Milan et dans les environs by Luigi Bossi (1758–1835), written for Pietro and Giuseppe Vallardi.

If we focus on Carta’s guidebook, we see how this celebrated the new public monuments by indulging in the traditional comparison with the ancient world: ‘un si grand nombre de travaux, qui pour le grandeur, la magnificence et la perfection rappellent tout ce qu’on nous narrates des Égyptiens, des Grècs et des Romains’.²² Attention was also paid to local manufacturers and private residences. The opening statement – ‘Milan est la première ville manifacturière du royaume . . . est le rendez-vous des artistes en tout genre et en tout ce qui concerne les arts, à present on peut appeller le Milanais l’italien par excellence’ – was followed by detailed appreciation of local industries, from goldsmithing to artificial flowers, velvets, silk stockings, trinkets, cabinetry, crockery, geographical maps and leather, complete with addresses.²³ This was followed by a description of the ‘Édifices’, covering a few public and the many private ones, and highlighting the architectural façades and the decorative elements, while just touching upon the objets remarquables kept inside, and mentioning a few artists.

Take, for example, Palazzo Durini, ‘que l’amateur des arts ne manque point de visiter’,²⁴ or Palazzo Melzi, home to a remarkable painting: ‘parmi plusieurs peintures de bonnes écoles on y admire un tableau sur bois peint par César Magnì ou Cesare da Sesto élève du célèbre Léonard.’²⁵ Only in rare cases did Carta go into greater detail, perhaps being privy to first-hand information: at the Palazzo Taverna he mentioned the ‘superbe tableau de Gaudence Ferrario qui représente la S. Étable avec S. Jêrôme, que l’on croit le portrait de l’archevêque Arcimboldi’;²⁶ and at the Palazzo Cusani he exalted ‘the S. Famille que l’on distingue par la beauté de ses contours, la vivacité de son coloris et la perfection de ses figures est du pinceu de Joseph Riberas dit le Spagnoletto’.²⁷ Writing about Palazzo Litta ‘un des plus beaux de la ville’, a must-see for all travellers, Carta noted how ‘deux galeries sont enrichies de tableaux’, and dwelt on what was unanimously considered the masterpiece of the collection: ‘on y admire une peinture de Correggio qui figure Apollon et Marsias’ – an attribution that would persist until Mündler’s stay in Milan in 1852.²⁸ At the home of Calderara Pino, the writer mentioned a ‘tableau du gran Titien qui représente Moses au puits de Madian’, and dedicated an enthusiastic paean to Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Christ avec la Femme adultère’.²⁹

On the other hand, Carta’s assessment of the city’s few antiquarian collections provides more competent and interesting insights: ‘Le Palais Rossi, qu’on pourrait appeller un musée d’antiquités pour le grand nombre de monumens anciens qu’il renferme, ce bâtiment présente au curieux savans un nombre infini de marbres anciens, plusieurs avec de figures sculptées d’autres avec des inscriptions’. Carta seemed to know the origins of the collection well, noting that its contents had been: ‘rassemblés par un comte Archinti dans le xvie siècle et retirés en grand partie de l’ancien château de Seprio’.³⁰ Likewise, the Trivulzio residence was described with the expert eye of the habitué, familiar with many of the objects on display: the diatreta cup and the ivory consular diptychs of ancient Roman age, the cameo of Antonia and the immense medallion were all a tribute to the passion of the house archaeologist, Abbot Carlo Trivulzio (1715–1789).³¹ Moreover, Carta gave pride of place to a few bibliothèques particulières – among which was the valuable Aldine collection owned by Gian Maria Pezzoli, later inherited by Gian Giacomo.³² Finally, the ‘Musées’ chapter made extensive reference to scientific and natural history collections: for instance, the natural history museum of the Lyceum of San Alessandro and the mineralogical collections ‘des Poudres et Salpêtres’ in via Santa Teresa. But above all he made ample mention of the cabinets particuliers, among them notably those of the Ala Ponzone, Beccaria, Bigli, Casati, Stampa di Soncino and Trivulzio families.

Carta’s guidebook bore witness to the progressive musealization of the patrician residences, made possible through increased accessibility and redistribution of the exhibition areas. This new dimension embodied the aspiration of the Milanese gentry for a better organized access to knowledge and a more discerning approach to collecting, but it also opened up these displays to a new generation of travelling writers and critics, mainly foreigners, often equipped with an expert eye for works of art, and whose systematic research benefited from direct inspection.

Rediscovering Milan

As Francis Haskell observed in his essential work Rediscoveries in Art of 1976, it was only with great effort – and not without struggle – that ‘perhaps the most clamorous subversion of artistic values among those that are known to us’ took place during those first decades of the nineteenth century. Art historians labelled this radical change in taste a ‘rediscovery of the Primitives’,³³ and characterized it as an ever intensifying interest, motivated by different factors, undoubtedly of long gestation, and directed first to the artists of the early Renaissance and then to those of the preceding medieval period.

The rediscovery of artists who preceded Raphael and had hitherto been considered imperfect was partly due to the diffusion of new aesthetic ideals, thanks to a renewed interest in attributes such as purity and formal virtue. At the same time, the new paradigm of historical research brought lesser-known personalities into the historiographical evolution of artistic styles and schools, often rescued from oblivion by pioneering studies such as those of Jean Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, Carl Friederich von Rumohr, Gustav Waagen and Franz Theodor Kugler. All of these started from the authority and historiographical legacy of Luigi Lanzi.

The re-engagement with so-called Primitive Art had, in fact, begun at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of Italian scholars. In Milan, the Old Masters of the local school, Bergognone, Zenale, Luini and Foppa, had been brought to light as a result of the in-depth study of acknowledged masters such as Bramante and Leonardo, primarily by Venanzio de Pagave and Antonio Francesco Albuzzi. Initially this research focused on the traceable presence of these artists in public and private collections, but progressively they became the object of increasing interest, which emerged from a mutual influence between historiography and collecting; the significant representation of fifteenth-century Lombard masters in the collection of Giacomo Melzi formed between 1782 and 1795 perfectly epitomizes this new trend.³⁴

In accordance with the standards of the time, a well-balanced collection had to showcase a certain number of Old Masters, not only for aesthetic reasons but also to outline with clarity the chronological and stylistic evolution of a particular school. However, it was some time before this concept emerged from the local sphere to be codified and formalized in a broader context, and this coincided with the rising popularity of Italian art beyond the Alps. Together with more historical and political factors, such as the many cycles of Napoleonic suppression of ecclesiastical orders (the last one in Milan in 1811) and the establishment of major European museums, this shifting taste gave impetus to the circulation of travellers to the peninsula, widening their social background and at least partially modifying their interests and purposes.

Maria, Lady Callcott, and her husband Augustus W. Callcott were among the first eminent personalities to show an intense interest in early Renaissance art, developed while they were on their honeymoon travelling through northern Europe and Italy in 1827–8. Lady Callcott, who became an acclaimed author, pioneered a distinct kind of travel writing which was later developed professionally by the great art scholars of the mid-century, from Eastlake to Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle to Giovanni Morelli. Callcott’s artistic preferences were nevertheless much broader than theirs, and revealed an unconditional admiration for Raphael.³⁵ The couple’s tour had followed in the footsteps of the Van Eyck brothers in Flanders and then proceeded to Lombardy and the Veneto in pursuit of the great masters of the fourteenth century, from Giotto to Altichiero. In Milan they dedicated much time to Bernardino Luini.³⁶ According to Serviliano Latuada’s guide of 1737–8 to Milan, Luini’s works were highly sought after, by comparison with those of other painters, not only in the more obvious tourist destinations like the Pinacoteca di Brera – where his detached frescos were admired, along with those of Gaudentius – , the Monastero Maggiore and Casa Litta, but also in more remote and less visited locations such as Saronno, where the entire pictorial decoration of Santa Maria dei Miracoli had been extolled by Lanzi. Over the centuries, there was hardly a time in Milan when Luini was not considered an important artist. His consecration as Leonardo’s main Lombard heir dated back to the late sixteenth century; later, in the wake of a sweeping ‘Leonardesque revival’, he appeared among Federico Borromeo’s favourite artists.³⁷ However, the nineteenth century was undoubtedly the period of his greatest fortune and his confirmation as the most beloved Milanese Renaissance artist.³⁸

This remarkable broadening of preferences had many repercussions for the Italian art market in general, and for that of Milan in particular. By the mid-century, the city was characterized by a sensational circulation of works of art. Haskell described this as ‘a single colossal speculative campaign having as its object the trade in works of art’; he further observed that ‘A crowd of adventurers, agents, merchants, and failed artists descended on Italy like a flock of vultures and gathered their spoils by extorting them from the local nobility forced to pay exorbitant taxes imposed by the invading French army’. Haskell summed up his colourful remarks with a somewhat emblematic declaration of King George III, reported in the Annals of the Fine Arts of 1817: ‘I never sent a nobleman to Italy without him later turning into an art dealer’.³⁹

The Scottish lawyer William Buchanan (1777–1864), if not a nobleman, was at least a gentleman who turned into an art dealer. During fifty years of activity, he witnessed the changes and opportunities arising from the Italian art market. He began his adventure in the early nineteenth century, when his agent in Italy, the painter James Irvine (1757–1831), tipped him off that the time was ‘ripe for foreign agents to approach Italian patrician families’,⁴⁰ alerting him to the fact that the real ‘powers that be’ were not the collectors themselves, but their advisers and intermediaries. This factor clearly emerges in Buchanan’s Memoirs of Painting, published in 1824 to celebrate his role in the development of British artistic heritage.⁴¹ The exchange between Buchanan and Irvine highlights an activity that was at first mainly limited to the Genoese and Roman areas but later extended to a wide selection of paintings by great masters of the Baroque age, such as Guido Reni, Van Dyck and Rubens. Milan was barely mentioned at the time, except by one of the protagonists of the central decades of the century: Giuseppe Molteni.⁴² The Milanese painter was a skilled restorer and an intermediary between Lombard collectors and foreign buyers; he worked mainly for Eastlake, but was also a family friend and adviser to Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli. In July 1827 Irvine purchased an Adoration of the Shepherds by Garofalo through him, at the request of Sir William Forbes (1773–1828).⁴³

The entire first half of the nineteenth century saw this transition from the restricted world of art scholars and aristocratic elites to an ever widening group of connoisseurs and discerning amateurs, including the new collectors of the bourgeoisie. In his highly successful Itinéraire d’Italie of 1843, a sort of manuel portatif for the entire peninsula, Vallardi detailed the Lombard School, including ‘les écoles de Milan, de Parme, de Crémone, de Mantove et de Modène’. Among the illustrious painters and architects, the names of the older masters surfaced: they were Cesare Cesariano, Vincenzo Foppa, Ambrogio da Fossano, Cesare da Sesto ‘élève de Raphael’, Bernardino da Treviglio, Bernazzano, the Luini and Gaudenzio, followed by Daniele Crespi, Caravaggio and Cerano, and ending with the latest creditable and recognized representatives of the genius loci, Andrea Appiani and Giuseppe Bossi. However, the stylistic features attributed to the Milanese painters remained quite generic: the ‘nouveauté et le gôut dans les caractères, ses contours sont arrondis, les figures riantes, les coloris brillant et fort, les raccoureis trés-frequents, l’étude soignée surtout dans le clair-obscurs et dans le perspective lineaire’.⁴⁴

Vallardi’s relevance is better understood when his book is compared with John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Italy, whose 1852 edition condensed a wide range of painters into a small chapter (‘Fine Arts of Lombardy’), drawing on Franz Theodor Kugler’s considerations of painting while also underlining the importance of local sculpture. From the reliefs of the Porta Romana, ‘remarkably rude, fully as coarse as those of our Saxon ancestors’, to the breathtaking Certosa di Pavia, where sculptors such as Amadeo, Briosco, Fusina and Solari were only named (while Vallardi described them as a coherent group): ‘They have . . . one uniform character with an extraordinary delicacy of finish in details and also pictorial management of their figures in bassorilievo so that it seems as if the works of Andrea Mantegna or Pietro Perugino had been transferred to marble’.⁴⁵

By now, the ‘Galeries et cabinets d’objets d’art chez les particuliers’ category was a customary one, and Vallardi duly paid homage to Milanese private collections. However, he managed greatly to expand his scope by including drawings, prints and engravings, medal collections, carpets, tapestries and musical instruments, and the names of well-known families such as the Archinto, the Borromeo, the Castelbarco, the Litta, the Melzi, the Scotti and the Trivulzio occur frequently. New maisons were also added, such as those of the Bolognini, the Casati Pallavicini Sforza, the Perego and the Uboldo, and finally Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli’s.⁴⁶

As a result of this new awakening of aesthetic and art-historical values, Milan no longer suffered from an inferiority complex: its heritage, particularly the private one, shielded from Napoleonic lootings, was in many cases further enriched after the suppression of churches and convents. Collections, particularly those of the Melzi, the Trivulzio and the Barbiano di Belgioioso, not only included fine works of art but also books and codices. This huge regno quadrario (realm of paintings), as it has been appositely defined by Federico Cavalieri,⁴⁷ widely distributed over a territory that was still hard to access, was scarcely monitored by official studies and was often characterized by somewhat amateurish attributions. It was thanks to professional figures, art experts, guides, influencers, intermediary figures between the artistic and the merchant world, international agents and scholars that those gaps were gradually filled.

A case-study: Alfonso Reichmann and the Reichmann Hotel

When foreign agents and other visiting connoisseurs acting for international museums arrived in town, they were immediately caught up in an inextricable knot of relationships. The figure of the art dealer Alfonso Reichmann (1812–1891) provides a good case-study on this topic.

Reichmann’s name is not entirely unknown in reports and studies related to the Milanese art market and the history of collecting,⁴⁸ but no focused research has yet been conducted on him. Here we may provide a few initial leads on this figure, which will be further explored on a future occasion. Reichmann became a well-known merchant in the middle of the century, originally working out of the hotel in Palazzo Acerbi in Milan, of which he was the proprietor; he pursued his dealing activities mainly by means of his contacts with foreign visitors to the hotel, who very often happened to be avid buyers of Milanese luxury goods.

Reichmann’s impact on the art-dealing scene is yet to be fully assessed, but we do know that he occasionally dealt with high-profile clients, from Frederick Stibbert to Aldo Annoni, Michele Cavaleri and Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. Valuable works passed through his hands, which can be exemplified by one of his most significant transactions. Probably around 1870, he was able to acquire from the Sommi Picenardi collection the magnificent Adoration of the Child, a large altarpiece by Bernardino Campi which was later put on display by Reichmann in his hotel (Fig. 6).⁴⁹ A few months earlier, in 1868, the painting had already been seen by some connoisseurs, perhaps the duo of Cavalcaselle and his collaborator Joseph Archer Crowe, who stood in admiration and recognized it as a work of considerable interest. The two art critics were already familiar with Reichmann and his ability to operate among the big players in the city’s art market.⁵⁰ And although no evidence has been found so far in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli and its archive to establish any connection with Gian Giacomo, in fact he and Reichmann met and certainly collaborated, as collectors, during the preparation for the Esposizione Storica d’Arte Industriale in 1874 (an event that attracted many art lovers and travellers, consolidating Milan’s appeal overseas); together with Giovanni Battista Lucini Passalacqua, Reichmann and Poldi Pezzoli proposed to decorate the walls of the Salone dei Giardini di Porta Venezia with Western and Eastern military trophies and arms.⁵¹

A further case may be mentioned – that of Pietro Roverselli, a simple ‘café-holder’ in Corso di Porta Vercellina, a few steps away from the Spezieria Pessina shop and opposite Palazzo Litta.⁵² Such a privileged location was right at the heart of one of the main crossroads for tourists on their way from Santa Maria delle Grazie to San Maurizio. A self-taught ‘art expert’ turned middleman, Roverselli was a shrewd intermediary, one who could easily treble the value of a painting in the course of negotiations. One example is Mantegna’s Virgin and Child with Saints from Casa Mellerio, then the collection of the Somaglia family (and now in the National Gallery, London, inv. no. ng274), bought from the established dealer Giuseppe Baslini and then sold to the representative of the National Gallery, Sir Charles Eastlake.⁵³ During the 1850s Roverselli, who would later be described by the expert collector Morris Moore (1811–1885) as a ‘forte’ (big) liar, whose commissions were a ‘waste of money’,⁵⁴ built his own very successful profession, often acquiring previously auctioned works of art, like those from the Palazzo Litta, which were sold in 1837 after Duke Litta’s collection was broken up. Some of his purchases were also made while accompanying Otto Mündler, agent for the National Gallery, to other collections (like that of the still unidentified Mr Pedemonte in 1855) until he built his own (1858).⁵⁵

Like Roverselli, Reichmann lacked specific training and was no more than an amateur. He was a hotelier who inherited his profession from his father, Federico, whose family had settled in Milan from Switzerland at the end of the eighteenth century. He had opened a small boarding house, called Reichmann’s, and relied on his contacts with Germany and German-speaking Switzerland to establish his own international clientele in Contrada dei Moroni.⁵⁶ Interestingly, in an 1817 panorama of the city looking south-west from the Duomo (Fig. 7), the modest Reichmann house stood out just like monuments and aristocratic palaces, the homes of well-known collections,⁵⁷ while other more distinguished hotels were shown in an obviously understated fashion.⁵⁸ There is a good chance that the author of this print, the Swiss sculptor Heinrich Keller (1778–1862) was staying at Reichmann’s hotel at the time, and had some kind of connection with Alfonso’s father. The artist was also a friend of Enrico Mylius (1769–1854), famous entrepreneur and collector, whose nephews Giorgio and Federico Mylius later met Reichmann. Surely, strong solidarity and tight networking between protestant immigrants in Milan were among the many factors behind the Reichmann family’s success on the art-dealing scene.⁵⁹ When the city view was printed, Alfonso Reichmann was only 5 years old, and Mylius was the city guide for Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.⁶⁰ A few years later the print was republished by the same Vallardi of the Itineraire d’Italie.⁶¹ The Reichmann family business grew quite quickly, and by 1821 the Reichmanns had acquired the adjacent Palazzo Acerbi, previously owned by the Napoleonic general Domenico Pino (Figs. 8 and 9).⁶²

The former Cozzi family palace (later owned by the Origoni and then the Venini before eventually becoming the Acerbi family palazzo) was itself a monument of Milan and featured as such in the popular city views by Marc’Antonio Dal Re, so that travellers were prompted to pay a visit.⁶³ The new and prestigious location in the seventeenth-century building provided a notable improvement in the standard of accommodation at the Reichmann Hotel, which progressed from purely family management to a more complex establishment appropriate to richer and larger spaces (Fig. 8). According to an act of the Touring Club commission, it was essential for the staff of a top-tier hotel to also be educated and able to provide information of cultural interest when requested.⁶⁴ Probably Reichmann took this as a starting point for his dealing activities. Customers found much higher standards in his establishment than in the average Italian taverns, as clearly stated in a review by the English writer William Thomson: ‘Reichmann’s Hotel afforded us such excellent accommodation at a reasonable rate, that I cannot refrain from recommending it strongly to future travellers. It is a large handsome building on the Corso di Porta Romana. The table is admirably served; the apartments are comfortably furnished; and the servants are numerous and obliging’.⁶⁵ The Reichmann Hotel quickly became the most acclaimed in Milan, and for some, even in the whole of Italy.

Around the 1820s, the hotel was already receiving such distinguished clients as August von Goethe (1789–1830), son of Wolfgang, the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) and the art historian Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843) during the last of his three journeys to Italy.⁶⁶ By 1843 Alfonso Reichmann and his brother Guglielmo were already seen as the outright owners of the business, though they were still associated with their mother, Anna Jelklin. The hotel continued to attract a distinguished clientele, such as Mündler and probably Eastlake himself. Mündler seemed to trust Reichmann and his familiarity with the city when it came to visiting wealthy buyers, private sellers or other merchants. Reichmann’s position as maître d’hôtel kept him constantly updated on Milanese news of cultural interest, and on art market dynamics, which certainly boosted his reliability. For example, in his diaries Mündler recalled Reichmann’s bringing him ‘to one Sig.r Mainoni, who has got a quantity of interesting pictures’,⁶⁷ or again ‘to the old dealer, Castagna, whose name I had forgotten and where I had been twice before. Nothing worth seeing’.⁶⁸ In the latter case, Mündler was probably referring to Giuseppe Castagna, textile manufacturer, later converted to collector and art dealer, and to visits made to Castagna relating to a painting by Barocci which had possibly been sold decades earlier in Milan, ending up in the Count of Betz’s collection.⁶⁹

Within the hotel context, profitable connections would naturally develop between connoisseurs and salesmen. Let us picture an informal meeting: Mündler spoke of a great ‘Ball at Reichmann’s, where he introduces me to his friend Bozzotti who has a collection of pictures to dispose of’.⁷⁰ If the dates are accurate (January 1856), this was an heir of the goldsmith Antonio Bozzotti, who had died in 1854. Before that, his paintings were on display at Neri e Bozzotti’s office at 963 Contrada dell’Agnello, while his home was at 2564 Santa Maria Fulcorina, Casa Alari Visconti.⁷¹ So not only the local and foreign aristocracy and distinguished travellers, but even entrepreneurs, artists and collectors like Bozzotti could attend a high society event at Reichmann’s. In this regard, it is worth mentioning a truly grand celebration, a generation earlier, where some of the Reichmann family connections attended the famous ball held by Count Batthyány in 1828.⁷² Among them was Giorgio Mylius, a prominent businessman and nephew of the aforementioned Enrico Mylius. He came dressed as Gustavus Adolphus the Great (as portrayed by the painter Pelagio Palagi), in a costume designed by Francesco Hayez, under the direction of the scene designer Alessandro Sanquirico, the painter Giovanni Migliara and the architect Rodolfo Vantini.⁷³ It was an unconventional experience: a foreign visitor, immersed in the past, and surrounded by ancient relics, who would make a fitting appearance ‘à demi vivant et à demi mort’. Vantini (1792–1856), who had drawn up the plans for the Batthyány palace, was an old acquaintance of Federico Reichmann (d. 1837), Alfonso’s father; in 1838 Vantini designed the memorial monument and gravestone for Federico, while he was still at work on the project of Palazzo Frizzoni in Bergamo.⁷⁴ Federico Frizzoni and his brother Giovanni were other friends of Vantini, and also very close to Reichmann: Giovanni married Alfonso’s sister, Clementina Vittoria Reichmann,⁷⁵ and their son was the famous art historian Gustavo Frizzoni. However, this family tie has not yet formed the subject of a study, and Alfonso Reichmann’s relationship with his nephew remains undocumented. Indeed, Giovanni Morelli’s cursory remark about Reichmann, at the time of his purchase of a ‘bel ritratto di donna in veste rossa’⁷⁶ attributed to Hans Mielich – only one of the traces left by Reichmann the art dealer⁷⁷ – suggests that there was no close partnership between Alfonso and Gustavo.

In 1876 Reichmann sold his business in Corso di Porta Romana, but until then he continued to combine his lucrative activities as an art dealer with those of hotelier: the established nature of the art business is evident from several documents relating to it that carry the address ‘Presso l’Albergo Reichmann’.⁷⁸ It is safe to recognize him as an art adviser from at least the second half of the 1850s, when he requested an export permit for a work he owned, attributed to Bernardino Luini and now lost: a very damaged fresco transferred to canvas which depicted the Madonna and Child, San Giovannino and Santa Marta (the documents of the Brera Commission upheld the attribution to Luini, but confirmed that the painting was now substantially destroyed: ‘la trovò così guasta e si può dire quasi perduta, da considerarla piuttosto l’ombra del lavoro originale, di quello che sia un pezzo d’arte degno di particolare considerazione’ [found it so spoiled and one could say almost lost, that he considered it rather a shadow of the original work, than a piece of art worthy of special consideration]).⁷⁹ The painting had been part of Reichmann’s collection on show at Palazzo Acerbi,⁸⁰ where his paintings could be seen by guests and added interest and value to the common and private spaces of the hotel; that the works were on show turned the whole building into an open collection, accommodated in an elegant and luxurious setting, as opposed to the traditional merchant’s atelier (Fig. 9).⁸¹ The buyer of Luini’s painting was Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, a prestigious client whom Reichmann was able to meet during one of the duke’s visits to Milan (at the time, one of Georg’s favourite residences was the opulent Villa Carlotta on Lake Como).⁸²

Reichmann maintained a correspondence with the Museo Civico of Milan, as well as with the commission organizing the Esposizione Storica d’Arte Industriale; he donated some Oriental art pieces to the museum and helped officials to establish contacts with foreign institutions, in particular with the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.⁸³ The president of the commission for the Milan exhibition praised the ‘geniali relazioni’ fostered by the ‘rappresentante del Museo Nazionale Germanico di Norimberga, Alfonso Reichmann’.⁸⁴ His presence was ubiquitous, from Florence to Stuttgart, and he passed through the Accademia di Belle Arti delle Marche (then known as Accademia Raffaello) region, where he was regarded as a distinguished patron.⁸⁵ In San Marino he collaborated with Luigi Cibrario, Gaetano Speluzzi and Charles de Bruc, and he donated a large number of art objects to the state, to allow the Museo del Stato to be founded in the ancient republic.⁸⁶ He even encouraged one of his clients, Carlo Currie, to donate a beautiful St John the Baptist to San Marino; the work is now attributed to Bernardo Strozzi, but at the time it was thought to be by Murillo.⁸⁷ More research is needed to clarify Reichmann’s role in many different contexts, but we have now established how these philanthropic activities were carried out concurrently with his activities as art merchant and hotelier.

These sometimes disjointed case-studies form a reminder of how many subtle connections in the Milanese art scene still escape us. In the case of Reichmann, we have been able to gather fresh evidence of the extent to which some of the most influential foreign agents were able to find effective trade contacts by means of personal ties that are hard to reconstruct. Reichmann’s lively network flourished thanks to an affinity with German and Protestant contacts, and to the enviable setting of a well-frequented and truly international hotel in the very centre of the city.

Acknowledgements

For the purposes of fulfilling their respective academic requirements, the authors wish to acknowledge that the texts of the first three sections, offering a general framing and scoping, are the work of Alessandro Squizzato and the fourth section, presenting a case-study on Alfonso Reichmann, is by Lorenzo Tunesi.

Footnotes